One is a bald, blue-eyed former hospital executive brand new to public office. Another is a career politician who leads statewide motorcycle tours to boost tourism. And the other is a former congressman and FOX News host who called a cop who gave him a traffic ticket last month an “idiot.”

All three are newly elected Republican governors facing massive political upheaval over their slash-and-burn approach to state spending and rejection of billions of federal dollars for high-speed rail projects.

Call them the “Three Scrooges”: Rick Scott of Florida, Scott Walker of Wisconsin, and John Kasich of Ohio. Walker and Kasich replaced Democrats, and Scott replaced a Republican-turned-independent.

The three governors sit at the center of a nationwide debate that pits a tea party movement threatening to mow down any tax-and-spenders in its path against labor unions and advocates for children, the elderly, and the poor. In a sign of the anti-establishment movement’s influence, Scott unveiled his bare-bones budget earlier this month at a tea party rally, breaking with the tradition of formal announcements in the state capitol.

In another sign of the blurring of lines between campaigning and governing, Kasich has been Tweeting encouragement to his compatriots in Florida and Wisconsin.

…snip…

Whether the three governors from key political battleground states succeed could have implications for the 2012 election, when voters will decide whether the newly empowered GOP improved the nation’s fiscal health or cut too close to the bone. With 18 of the 23 winning Republican candidates for governor in 2010 in their first terms, they are largely charting new terrain.

…snip…

President Obama lent the Democratic Party machine’s support to the thousands of protesters storming the capitol in Madison this week and called Walker’s proposal to strip collective-bargaining rights from public employees an “assault on unions.” In response, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, released a statement in Walker’s defense.

“Republicans in Congress–and reform-minded GOP governors like Scott Walker, John Kasich, and Chris Christie [of New Jersey]–are daring to speak the truth about the dire fiscal challenges Americans face at all levels of government, and daring to commit themselves to solutions that will liberate our economy and help put our citizens on a path to prosperity,” Boehner said.

…snip…

Former Republican Govs. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and Jeb Bush of Florida, potential presidential candidates in 2012 and 2016, entered the fray on Friday. “The nation’s governors don’t need a lecture from a president who has never balanced a budget,” Pawlenty snapped. “Stay strong @Gov Walker,” said a particularly chatty Bush in one of five consecutive Twitter posts on the Wisconsin protests.

…snip…

Wisconsin has been at center stage as thousands of civil service employees rallied in the capitol against legislation that would force them to pay more for health and pension benefits. Democratic state senators went so far as to leave the state to avoid voting on the plan, which Walker says is necessary to help close a $137 million budget gap.

The protests have shut down school districts and some state agencies.

“I think the body politic is going to reject this,” said Graeme Zielinski, spokesman for the Wisconsin Democratic Party. “This is an unchecked power grab…. Reducing the quality of life of the middle class is going to continue to make people respond here and across the country.”

Ohio has also seen massive protests in the capitol over a similar proposal to limit collective-bargaining rights.

And in Florida, Scott faced a mini-rebellion from members of his own party this week when he joined Walker and Kasich in turning federal money down for high-speed rail. A veto-proof majority of the Florida Senate rebuked Scott in a letter that urged the federal government to give the state the money anyway, saying: “Politics should have no place in the future of Florida’s transportation.”

Coming to Scott’s defense were tea party activists, who plan to target the 26 senators who signed the letter.

i think trying to bust the unions will backfire on the rethugs. even people who don’t belong to a union have a parent or a relative who was or still is a member of one and will attest to the value of having that extra protection. i know a lot of people here in floriduhhh are not too thrilled about the lack of worker protections, so they won’t be thrilled with the rethugs.

and they can thank all the union street cleaners for picking up after their sorry asses.

i wonder what all these asswipes’ fathers did for a living. i’d bet more than one was in a union, and that union job fed and clothed them and allowed them to go to college so they could grow up and become governor.

One of the funniest tweets from last night was “teachers get out your red pencils to correct the Tea Partiers signs.” The Tea Party Patriots on Facebook were trying to save the demonstrating teachers some work by telling each other to spellcheck their signs. It didn’t work; some of them were still misspelled.

i saw one of them on CNN. the teabagger was walking around with a sign declaring “To AWOL Teachers – Your Fired”.

when we welcomed Sarah Palin/Michele Bachmann here last spring, I traded my bumper stickers (To Hell With Bachmann) for “Dumb Meets Dumber/The Dumb Summit” with a photo of the two princesses together. well, last fall someone took objection to my stickers and wrote on it in beautiful cursive:“and your too dumb to wash your car”

you just can’t make shit like that up.
two grammatical errors in 8 [9] words.

i should add that the other stickers were made by a fellow protester who made them on his own dime as well. he (organizer of one of the many anti-Bachmann sites) made buttons as well, plus we donated all the money raised to Ms. Clark.

these dumb teabaggers should shop around for private services that will maintain the roads, provide police and fire protection and emergency responce, private education for their kids and see how much net savings will end up in their pockets.

they don’t care. they’ve been brainwashed to the point where they think they deserve nothing, and the corporations who screw them daily deserve to be in charge of everything. maybe it’s stockholm syndrome.

how are they supposed to get to that path to prosperity when they have no control over their work environment, salary, or benefits? funny how bronzo the clown doesn’t see the irony when he and his coworkers get to vote themselves raises. they have the ultimate collective bargaining.

It’s about time for the right wingers to go full Whig and just kill the party. Even with the country in major decline they obsess over ladies private parts and 100 other silly things. If the end game is to have a hundred mega-wealthy run the place for all of the unpaid serfs, somehow I feel the 310 million disenfranchised won’t have that much trouble finding a hundred sticks. Just sayin’.

one other note on the Madison protests: when the teabaggers were bussed in from all over state (country ?), their numbers we still dwarfed by the union protesters. you can see this in any footage, be it CNN or MSNBC or other networks that covered it. the right wing gathering was on one side of the State Capitol Building, while the virtual river of progressives encircled them AND the Capitol plaza, marching continuously around them and drowning out anything the teabaggers had to say with pro-union chants.

one could also see this when one of the teabaggers was interviewed by CNN to give the “balancing” view: she was in a sea of teachers and civil workers who did allow her to speak, but the interviews underscored just how overwhelming the number of progressives was.

and yet, not a damn peep from the mass media regarding the numbers.
you know, were it reversed, the Faux News would be proclaiming 100,000,00o to a billion fair and balanced attendees. i am still hoping that come Monday, and gone the snowstorm blanketing us now, at least Rachael or Ed will report on that aspect.

on a related note, gotta LOVE Jesse there on Ed’s live remote show last Friday night!

I’m not certain Fux won’t just report their counts anyway. Facts have never hindered their fairly unbalanced reporting previously. I won’t be able to confirm this though because I won’t watch and check.

this just in: CNN reports that Walker made a direct appeal to the out of state union/protesters, saying blah blah blah. What he said wasn’t as important as the inescapable parallels to the recent Mubarak and Gadhafi speeches blaming the unrest on outsider and foreigners. this is just too damn spooky: rethugs imitating art.